For those channels still monetizing, there’s some good news: YouTube has improved their monetization classifier - the automated system that decides whether a video is “advertiser friendly” or not. There should be less flipping back and forth between the yellow and green monetization icon. YouTube has pointed out that when you submit an appeal when you get the yellow icon, those human reviews help improving the system for everyone, so keep appealing.

YouTube has also removed some data from the YouTube Analytics Demographics report in order to better protect viewer privacy. In some cases, your videos will only show data in the report if your video or channel has sufficient traffic. If your video only has a few views, the location, age and gender of the viewers could be too revealing.

For website or blog publishers, there’s an interesting AdSense update: this week “Auto Ads” were launched. You just place a snippet of code on your web pages, and AdSense uses machine learning to decide where to place the ads. It will be interesting to see reports on how well that actually works.